NB: The music here had to be our anthem « La Marseillaise » but I deliberately chose this version of it by Serge Gainsbourg, because the men who just died had claimed the right to use derision, humor and impertinence to express their ideas.

I couldn’t think otherwise, in this moment, than just saying « I am Charlie, » as most of my country fellows are doing, and very touchingly, many people all around the world with us, as this first picture is alluding to.

And the meaning of these words, for me, is not that I align with everything that said or showed in comical drawings, by this French satirical newspaper, far from that. But it means that, beyond being pained and outraged by their cowardly assassination, I stand for this imprescriptible right they had to express their ideas and opinions freely – a right that is not only a right for journalists but which is a fundamental and common right for all French people, and more broadly for the entire free world!

So, it’s clearly this freedom of us that has been attacked these last days, because these fanatic Islamic people have no other project than to bring us back in our own medieval times, when religious people were assuming that nobody had the right to simply not believe in God, and could be punished or even killed just for that reason.

These people have not the slightest respect for the simple idea of “Human Right,” same as they demonstrate all the time that they don’t even have respect for life. But, as it was clearly said in this 1st spontaneous gathering of French protesters against this odious crime, at Place de la République (see it in pics above) we French won’t be afraid, because, exactly as was famously saying Charb, director of Charlie Hebdo that was just assassinated, we “prefer to die standing than to live down on our knees.”

So, we French certainly have a special role in defense of democracy and freedom, and as you may know, way long before the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Right in 1948, the French revolution had given the first expression for Human Right, in 1789 from which I would quote this precise article, concerning this particular right that these barbarian terrorists are denying to our country today …

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (France 1789):

Art. 11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.

So I know that we French will unite and stand for our rights altogether and these fascist fanatic jihadist won’t find us weak in front of the threat they want to use against us.
We will stand on our right to think what we want, to believe what we want, or to believe in nothing, and we will defend with our lives, the right to express these opinions freely and by all means as we see fit!